Web Page Editors

Step 2 - Pick a Web Page Design Editor

There are several Web Page Design editors. These editors help you to more easily build your web pages. The one's that are the eaiest to use are called WYSIWYG. This stands for What You See Is What You Get.

Now, the one editor that we cover extensively here in our tutorials is Nvu. Nvu is 100% FREE. We are also working on a Dreamweaver tutorial as well, coming soon.

Nvu allows you to easily insert text, graphics and other objects into a blank web page. This in turn creates HTML source code (Hyper Text Markup Language) behind the scenes.

The way it works is like this...

You design a webpage using Nvu or Dreamweaver.

Nvu is a FREE, available to all, web page editor. It's great when you're first starting to design web pages, especially considering the price tage.

Dreamweaver MX 2004 and the new version Dreamweaver 8, are owned by Macromedia and is considered to be the best editor out there. This is the one I use most of the time and the one I recommend if you're serious about web design.

Those programs create HTML code (known as source code) automatically for you. You save the page. Most page names are saved as either .html or .htm. This saves the page as source code.

You then upload (or send) that HTML code (along with any images) to your web hosting server.

A person visits your web site (URL) by typing in your domain name or by clicking a link from another website.

Their web browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, or FireFox) reads and interprets that HTML code and displays on the screen your website with all the colors and images.

HTML source code is just text. And it isn't pretty. The purpose for your browser is to turn the HTML source code into something more fashionable and easier to read. Your browser is really just an interpretor.

So without having to start off learning HTML (which can be kinda tedious), you can simply point and click, drag and drop and design your own web site easily using a web page editor, like Nvu or Dreamweaver.

You can use either web editor to get started, we'll show you how to download and install Nvu today in the next chapter....Right now, we'll also need a graphics design program (to create and edit images) if we're going to make a good web site.